Improved sequential insertion heuristics for berth allocation problems

Abstract

Berth allocation decisions affect all subsequent decisions in port terminals. Thus assigning berthing positions and berthing times to vessels—known as the berth allocation problem (BAP)—is one of the most important problems in port terminals. Because this is an NP‐hard problem, most of the solution methods proposed for solving it are heuristics. Although very different, some heuristics applied to the continuous BAP share a common step usually performed several times: the insertion of vessels from an insertion sequence in the time‐space diagram that represents a BAP solution. This process is frequently done by using minimum cost sequential insertion heuristics such as bottom‐left‐based heuristics. Although fast and simple, these heuristics may not lead to high‐quality solutions. In this paper, we propose improved sequential insertion heuristics that generally outperform the traditional ones and keep their simplicity and speed. The proposed heuristics are tested on a large set of instances of BAPs with different optimization objectives, and the obtained results show that they can lead to solutions up to 70% better than those obtained by traditional sequential insertion heuristics.